Tennisopolis Community Guidelines

Social networking brings Tennis players,
students, teaching pros, club directors, and industry
insiders together to connect, learn, explore business
opportunities and related topics. Feel free to share,
support, coach, even gossip with other members in any of our
many community areas.

If you're new to our community, please read these guidelines and
tips for getting started and how to benefit from participating.
A great place to start is building
your online profile. Whether you’re a casual player, avid
tennis fanatic or a business owner, announce to the world what you
stand for and what you offer.

We want our community to be comfortable, thought provoking,
helpful, safe, and easy to use. Tennisopolis is deeply committed to
including a wide range of views in our forums, groups and blog
postings. Our community policies are guided by the belief that free
expression and open communication will help players, students,
teachers, directors, vendors, and fans connect, find friendship,
support, feedback, learning, and experience diverse opinions. In
doing so, it is our hope that we can all become better people and
better professionals.

We respect individual differences in philosophies, beliefs,
opinions, and work styles, and expect our community members to do
the same. Please note that users who violate these guidelines may
be sent a warning and, if necessary, be banned from the
network.

Your Rights and
Responsibilities

Please bear in mind that all of the material you read in our
community areas comes from other members. Because our community is
very large, Tennisopolis doesn't monitor or verify all the
information posted by our members. The comments, opinions, and
statements posted on our bulletin boards, forums, groups and chats
don't necessarily reflect the views of Tennisopolis. The
information posted on our boards and blog postings, including
advice and opinions, is the responsibility of those members who
create the posts.

Please consult your business advisors or other qualified
professionals before relying on information you find in the
community areas. Tennisopolis is not responsible for the accuracy
of posts and is not liable for any damage or loss that may result
from your reliance on what other members have said.

All Tennisopolis communications, including blogs, group discussion
and forum posts, are public and not private communications.
Tennisopolis has the right to modify and publish (both on our site
and in other media) any information you post in our community
areas. Please note that the material you post may be indexed by
search engines such as Yahoo and Google.

Community staff and volunteer hosts may use your membership e-mail
to contact you regarding your messages in our community. You're
responsible for keeping your e-mail address active and updated.
Failure to keep your e-mail address updated may result in your
being banned until we can confirm that you have a valid e-mail
address associated with your Tennisopolis membership.

Keep your login information, including your password, private.
Sharing of memberships or screen names is not allowed and may
result in your being banned. Tennisopolis accepts no responsibility
for use of your membership or computer by third parties, with or
without your permission.

Post honestly and in good faith, with the intention to support,
share, and inform. We don't welcome people who disrupt our
community and create additional work for our hosts or staff. If we
believe that you're posting with the intent to cause disruption or
harm to your fellow members' community experience or enjoyment,
specific content may be deleted and you may be banned.

Tennisopolis has the right to delete any post and ban any user,
with or without notice, at any time and for any reason, including,
without limitation, our judgment that the user has violated these
community guidelines. Tennisopolis has no obligation to delete
content that you find personally objectionable or offensive. By
using the community areas you are agreeing to abide by our
guidelines and to submit to their interpretation and enforcement by
our staff.

We reserve the right to modify or change these guidelines without
notice.

Privacy Guidelines

Never provide your password, telephone numbers, or home address to
anyone online. Be very careful about responding to solicitations
for interviews or research. Note, however, that Tennisopolis
editors might invite you to respond to such solicitations from time
to time.

Never divulge any private or personal information about another
person online. That includes the person's real name or address,
e-mail address, and any other personal information that the person
has not asked you to make public. Don't forward or post private
messages that someone has sent to you unless you have his or her
permission. Only send e-mail to another Tennisopolis member if he
or she has given you expressed permission. Please don't solicit
other members' personal information.

The e-mail address you provide is for our use only, unless you
provide it to other members. By accepting friendships on
Tennisopolis, you take full responsibility for any e-mail you
receive. Tennisopolis does not monitor such communications and will
not intervene between members who use this function. The only way
to keep from receiving undesirable e-mail is to remove the
offending member from your friends list and not share your e-mail
address.

Members of the Tennisopolis community sometimes organize matches,
meet-ups, rallies, donations, gift exchanges, reunions, and other
offline activities. Such arrangements are private and are not
sponsored, vetted, or hosted by Tennisopolis. You participate at
your own risk.

If you're looking for subjects to interview or participants for a
study, please contact the Community Manager to ask for permission
before querying the Tennisopolis community.

Profile Names

We are building a community for personal and business interaction,
so we encourage you to use your real name (or business' name.)
Adding a last name is up to you. If you choose to be anonymous,
please choose a screen name that's in good taste. If you select one
that we deem to be vulgar, obscene or that misrepresents you to
others, we'll ask you to change your name. If you do not change
your name within 3 calendar days we may ban you.

Anyone who tries to impersonate a Tennisopolis staff member,
writer, expert, host, or other user — or who creates a screen name
in order to hide his or her identity while violating our guidelines
— will be banned immediately, permanently and without notice.

Profiles

Nothing contained in a member's profile may violate Tennisopolis'
community guidelines in any way. Examples of violations include,
but are not limited to links to inappropriate material, competitive
advertising and foul language.

Insults, Libel and
Threats

Insulting another community member is never acceptable, even in the
liveliest of debates. Please note that in a debate, you can state
that another member's point of view is wrong, misguided, or
uninformed and still be within the guidelines. We take attacks and
insults on debate threads very seriously. We reserve the right to
end or delete any discussion if, in our sole judgment, it has
wandered from being a healthy discussion into an exchange of
attacks and insults.

Please note that we do not allow
religious debates on Tennisopolis.

External Web Sites

It's fine to mention, link to, or discuss most other web sites,
including your own, that may be of interest to our members, as long
as the web sites you refer to are consistent with our guidelines.
You may not promote a website that we feel is in direct competition
with Tennisopolis. We do not allow linking to pornographic sites or
gambling sites directly or indirectly.

Community Areas

To participate in our community areas (forums, groups, etc.) you
agree to the following:

Do use community areas to comment, share ideas, buy goods and
services, and seek capital.

Don't post any advertising, promotional materials, referrals,
junk mail, spam, chain letters, pyramid schemes, or any other form
of solicitation.

Don't post anything you don't have the right to publish or
violate any copyright or other proprietary rights in your posts.
That includes excerpting published articles without the author or
owner's permission.

Don't transfer issues or posts from one forum, blog, or group
to another with the intention of drawing negative attention to the
issue.

Don't use all capital letters in your chat or bulletin board
postings unless you REALLY MEAN TO YELL!

Don't post a message in more than one location.

Don't flood. This includes repeatedly "bumping" a thread,
disrupting an online chat event by entering the same phrase over
and over again, or otherwise using up bandwidth for no reason.

Don't "friend spam". This means that members are not allowed to
randomly send friend requests to unreasonably large amounts of
members that they have not met organically on the site. You may
have as many friends as like, but do not "friend spam".

Don't post on behalf of banned members. If you do this, you may
be banned without notice or warning.

Spamming and
Self-promotion

We understand the desire for members to use Tennisopolis as a way
to promote themselves and their businesses. We want to encourage
and foster this, but there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to
do it. You may not directly advertise or promote yourself en masse
to the membership via messaging (unless they are a friend or in a
group and only if it's relevant to the group discussion), in any
comment, in any blog or forum discussion, or any media.

Any advertising or mention of tennis sites offering similar
features to Tennisopolis are not allowed. For example, it would be
completely inappropriate to walk into a tennis club and hand out
fliers to players about your club across the street.

The appropriate way to attract attention is to be a periodic
contributor of valued content to the site. Brief plugs at the
end of contributed content is generally acceptable. However, brief
plugs at the end of a welcome message for a new member that is
obviously self promoting is unacceptable. If you would like to
advertise your company, products or services to the membership at
large, please contact us about advertising on Tennisopolis.

A serious violation of the Tennisopolis community is poaching or
directly soliciting Tennisopolis members using our internal
messaging technology for competitive purposes. We are not against
competitors or competition, present and future. However, using the
Tennisopolis internal email messaging or platform to post a self
promoting blog, discussion, or comment on any profile wall with the
intent to advertise a competitive web site is in violation of our
community guidelines and subject to immediate ban, and probable
legal prosecution.

Copyright Violations

Please do not upload any copyrighted works including, but not
limited to, photos, videos and text. We've noticed a large amount
of very professional looking photos of pros lately. Please take
these down if you did not take the photo or have specific
permission to use the photo.

Violations of Community
Guidelines

If you violate the Tennisopolis community guidelines, you may be
contacted individually by community staff. Your actions may result
in a warning, a suspension, or permanent banning from participation
in our community. If you poach and solicit Tennisopolis members
using our messaging, you will be prosecuted. We do not publicly
discuss or announce warnings, suspensions or bannings.

Banning is done at the community staff's discretion and is the
result of our sole determination of a member's demonstrated
inability or disinclination to follow our guidelines. We reserve
the right to ban any member at any time for any reason, with or
without warning.

If a thread that contains a violation of these guidelines has
information that's useful to the original poster or other members
of the site, it may be edited or locked. However, if in our sole
judgment a thread was created for the purpose of violating the
guidelines, violates enough guidelines to be irredeemable, or
contains no otherwise useful information, it may be removed.

Because of the size of our community, we can't monitor all posts on
the site. If you see a message you believe violates our guidelines,
please contact us.

Community Manager

Your community manager is Mark Baker. We're
only an e-mail away. Please contact us (for example) regarding the
following:

Report any concern you have about our community

Get help navigating the site or participating in our
community

Get clarification of these guidelines or any other aspect of
our community